How to wrest control of our government away from corporations
Who do you believe?
If you believe the media, then you trust the billionaires who own nearly every national news outlet in the U.S. In a June 1, 2016, article, Forbes’ Kate Vinton writes that “[b]illionaires own part or all of several of America’s influential national newspapers, including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, in addition to magazines, local papers and online publications.”
Billionaires own or control cable TV networks, including John Malone (Liberty Media) and Brian Roberts (Comcast). So Rupert Murdoch (News Corp., owner of Fox), Jeff Bezos (the Washington Post), and Mexican media mogul Carlos Slim Helu (the New York Times) are among the people we depend on to deliver accurate, relatively objective accounts of the happenings in this increasingly dangerous world of ours.
It is estimated that six corporations own 90 percent of the media in the U.S. (source: Wikipedia): Comcast, Walt Disney, News Corp., Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS. (Note that Viacom and CBS are both part of National Amusements, owned by Sumner Redstone, who is in the midst of a messy dispute over his competency, as reported on Fortune). Corporate control of the media is one of the prerequisites of a corporate takeover of the government, as Chris Hedges explains in a June 13, 2016, post on the unapologetically progressive Common Dreams.
Keep in mind, Hedges starts with the premise that the corporate state already exists. The usurpation of the U.S. government is a fait accompli. Even if you disagree with this position, you can’t deny the great influence corporations have on politics and the media. Hedges goes further, positing that our corporate overlords are engaged in a propaganda campaign intended to hide the fact that the environment is about to collapse, and the economy along with it (or vice-versa).
We want to believe what corporations and their political minions promise us: “We will restore your jobs, we will protect your privacy and civil liberties, we will rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, we will save the environment, we will prevent you from being exploited by banks and predatory corporations, we will make you safe, we will provide a future for your children.” In fact, according to Hedges, the opposite is true.
The struggle to overcome ‘the false hope, the grand illusion’
Hedges compares the unwillingness of U.S. citizens to face the reality of the perils ahead to the approach taken by the Jewish leaders in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, who encouraged people to “work within the parameters of their Nazi occupiers” and who discouraged any form of resistance – until it was too late. Hedges quotes one of the Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, Zivia Lubetkin, as stating the greatest problem faced by the underground movement was “the false hope, the great illusion.”
Hedges concludes that “the relentless drive to plunge as much as two-thirds of the country into poverty to enrich a tiny corporate elite, along with the psychosis of permanent war, presage a dystopia that will be as severe as the totalitarian systems that sent tens of millions to their deaths during the reigns of fascism and communism.”
It’s easy to chalk up such dire predictions as no more than Malthusian claptrap – things rarely turn out as badly as we fear, due primarily to future developments that are impossible for us to foresee. Yet it’s difficult not to sense some truth in Hedges’ statement that “[t]he goal [of the corporate state] is to keep us fooled and demobilized as long as possible.” Hedges calls for disruption via nonviolent, sustained civil disobedience, as well as the creation of political parties and other groups that are “independent of the corporate political machines that control the Republicans and Democrats.”
Our survival depends on the demise of politics as usual
Another long-time political dissenter, Noam Chomsky, presents a different perspective on the current state of U.S. politics in his new book, Who Rules the World?, an excerpt of which appears on The Nation in a June 13, 2016, post. According to Chomsky, mainstream Democrats are now equivalent to the moderate Republicans of two decades ago. Republicans have moved so far to the right that they are off the standard political spectrum and have become a “radical insurgency,” according to conservative political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein.
Chomsky writes that “the Republican Party’s dedication to wealth and privilege has become so extreme that its actual policies could not attract voters, so it has had to seek a new popular base, mobilized on other grounds: evangelical Christians who await the Second Coming, nativists who fear that ‘they’ are taking our country away from us, unreconstructed racists, people with real grievances who gravely mistake their causes, and others like them who are easy prey to demagogues and can readily become a radical insurgency.” (And I thought I wrote long sentences!)
The way things stand right now, no effective climate-change legislation is ever going to come out of Congress – not now, and not after the next national election, regardless of the outcome. When government leaders from around the world met in Paris in late 2015 to discuss “unchecked climate change,” they concluded with an agreement they hoped would be legally binding on the countries that signed it. This is a pipe dream because, as the New York Times wrote at the time, “[a] treaty would be dead on arrival on Capitol Hill without the required two-thirds majority vote in the Republican-controlled Senate.” Any voluntary climate-change mitigation efforts are “a guarantee of failure,” according to the New York Times.
As Chomsky puts it, the Republican Party has become “a real danger to decent human survival.” This despite the fact that two-thirds of Americans are in favor of a binding international agreement to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, according to the New York Times, and more than 60 percent of the people in the U.S. consider climate change a more important issue than the economy. It just doesn’t matter to Congress. As I’ve written before, public opinion has no impact on policy.
Once more on the nuclear brink
Since the advent of the nuclear age, we have come a whisker or two away from the big bombs dropping on dozens of occasions. By luck or the clear thinking of the people whose fingers are on the buttons, we’ve avoided a nuclear-bomb calamity. But things are getting tense between the U.S., Russia, and China, not to mention those three countries’ many surrogates. When the Doomsday Clock was recently moved just a tick away from midnight, the scientists who made the call stated that a primary reason was that “war [between the U.S. and Russia in Eastern Europe] is no longer unthinkable.”
Chomsky’s prescription: A change of course. It’s not too late to enact the environmental and economic protections required to prevent 1) the complete overthrow of our American democracy by fascist corporations, and 2) the end of the human race on planet Earth. No such change is likely from any Democrat or Republican – at least not anytime soon. And time is in short supply.
So I ask again, who do you believe?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There’s too much worth telling you about than I can fit into a single Weekly, but I just got to point out a few other things:
First off, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has designated today, June 21, 2016, as a day of action to stop the proposed changes to Rule 41, which expands the government’s powers to break into people’s computers without a warrant. As EFF Activist Director Rainey Reitman states in a press release, “[t]he government is attempting to use a process designed for procedural changes to expand its investigatory powers.”
The new rule would allow federal magistrate judges to issue warrants to search computers outside their judicial district, which means any computer, anywhere in the world, can be hacked by the government without the owner’s knowledge or consent. This applies even to “innocent Internet users who are themselves victims of a botnet,” according to the EFF. So much for the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that the warrant state “with particularity” what is being searched by the government, why, and when.
In another Fourth-Amendment travesty, the U.S. Supreme Court has expanded the power of police to search and seize items or people in a vehicle even if the initial stop is illegal, if the police run a warrant check after the stop is made that turns up an outstanding warrant. In effect, police can stop any vehicle, any time, with or without reasonable suspicion, if one of the occupants of the vehicle turns out to have an outstanding warrant – even if that warrant is for a mere traffic violation.
Salon’s Daniel Denvir writes in a June 21, 2016, article that the silver lining of the court’s decision is Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s pointed dissent, which explains that the change will unfairly impact poor people, who are more likely to be named in one of the 7.8 million outstanding warrants that currently exist – most of which are for “minor offenses.” The result of the decision is police powers unprecedented in our nation’s history.
Your digital footprint has become a money-maker for Trooly, a new service that offers businesses a rating of your creditworthiness based on your online activities – everything from public crime databases to social-media posts. According to TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas in a June 20, 2016, article, the company applies “machine learning algorithms” to all the public data there is to glean about you on the Internet, including the so-called “dark web.”
The result is a mini-dossier that lets businesses know how trustworthy you are quickly, and without the need or expense of a full-blown background check. Trooly’s primary target is the financial services industry, but the service is so fast and cheap that it’s not difficult to envision businesses of all types asking Trooly for your reliability score before they do business with you. “Sorry, but your Facebook posts disqualify you from receiving our lowest interest rate.”
Phones at concerts and similar events have become a big problem, which has caused some artists to designate their shows as “phone-free.” Alicia Keyes, Louis C.K., and David Chapelle are among the performers who have gone so far as to collect the phones of their concert-goers before the show and place the phones in a locked pouch that attendees keep with them. If you need to use your phone, you exit the concert and a security person unlocks the pouch for you. The Washington Posts’ Geoff Edgers writes about the practice in a June 19, 2016, article on Medium.
The pouch is made by a company named Yondr. Artists feel more free to perform new songs without worrying about bootleg recordings when the audience members’ phones are locked away, and comedians can stop worrying about increased legal liability when their off-the-cuff jokes are published. The concert attendees report that the experience is heightened when no phones are present at the shows.
If Yondr can make concert audiences more respectful of the artists and other audience members, imagine what it could do in a house full of teenagers. I have a feeling Yondr is an idea that will catch on far and wide.
Things happen so fast in the tech world that it’s nearly impossible to keep up – unless you're 13 years old. The Internet can be a wonderful place for children, but as any parent knows (or should), it can be a dangerous place, too. A report released recently by UNICEF provides some insight into what young people are up to online.
Entitled Perils and Possibilities: Growing Up Online (pdf), the report found that 54 percent of the 10,000 18-year-olds surveyed in 25 countries would tell a friend if they were threatened online, and 44 percent believed they could help a friend who encountered an online risk. More worrisome from a parent’s perspective is that 59 percent of the adolescents surveyed believe meeting new people on the Internet is somewhat or very important to them, and more than half claim that a friend has engaged in “risky” online behavior.
The National Children’s Advocacy Center offers Internet Safety Tips for Kids and Teens, and the U.S. government’s official kids site, Kids.gov, provides guidelines for children in grades K through 5, for teens in grades 6 through 8, for parents, and for teachers.
If you believe the media, then you trust the billionaires who own nearly every national news outlet in the U.S. In a June 1, 2016, article, Forbes’ Kate Vinton writes that “[b]illionaires own part or all of several of America’s influential national newspapers, including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, in addition to magazines, local papers and online publications.”
Billionaires own or control cable TV networks, including John Malone (Liberty Media) and Brian Roberts (Comcast). So Rupert Murdoch (News Corp., owner of Fox), Jeff Bezos (the Washington Post), and Mexican media mogul Carlos Slim Helu (the New York Times) are among the people we depend on to deliver accurate, relatively objective accounts of the happenings in this increasingly dangerous world of ours.
It is estimated that six corporations own 90 percent of the media in the U.S. (source: Wikipedia): Comcast, Walt Disney, News Corp., Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS. (Note that Viacom and CBS are both part of National Amusements, owned by Sumner Redstone, who is in the midst of a messy dispute over his competency, as reported on Fortune). Corporate control of the media is one of the prerequisites of a corporate takeover of the government, as Chris Hedges explains in a June 13, 2016, post on the unapologetically progressive Common Dreams.
Keep in mind, Hedges starts with the premise that the corporate state already exists. The usurpation of the U.S. government is a fait accompli. Even if you disagree with this position, you can’t deny the great influence corporations have on politics and the media. Hedges goes further, positing that our corporate overlords are engaged in a propaganda campaign intended to hide the fact that the environment is about to collapse, and the economy along with it (or vice-versa).
We want to believe what corporations and their political minions promise us: “We will restore your jobs, we will protect your privacy and civil liberties, we will rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, we will save the environment, we will prevent you from being exploited by banks and predatory corporations, we will make you safe, we will provide a future for your children.” In fact, according to Hedges, the opposite is true.
The struggle to overcome ‘the false hope, the grand illusion’
Hedges compares the unwillingness of U.S. citizens to face the reality of the perils ahead to the approach taken by the Jewish leaders in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, who encouraged people to “work within the parameters of their Nazi occupiers” and who discouraged any form of resistance – until it was too late. Hedges quotes one of the Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, Zivia Lubetkin, as stating the greatest problem faced by the underground movement was “the false hope, the great illusion.”
Hedges concludes that “the relentless drive to plunge as much as two-thirds of the country into poverty to enrich a tiny corporate elite, along with the psychosis of permanent war, presage a dystopia that will be as severe as the totalitarian systems that sent tens of millions to their deaths during the reigns of fascism and communism.”
It’s easy to chalk up such dire predictions as no more than Malthusian claptrap – things rarely turn out as badly as we fear, due primarily to future developments that are impossible for us to foresee. Yet it’s difficult not to sense some truth in Hedges’ statement that “[t]he goal [of the corporate state] is to keep us fooled and demobilized as long as possible.” Hedges calls for disruption via nonviolent, sustained civil disobedience, as well as the creation of political parties and other groups that are “independent of the corporate political machines that control the Republicans and Democrats.”
Our survival depends on the demise of politics as usual
Another long-time political dissenter, Noam Chomsky, presents a different perspective on the current state of U.S. politics in his new book, Who Rules the World?, an excerpt of which appears on The Nation in a June 13, 2016, post. According to Chomsky, mainstream Democrats are now equivalent to the moderate Republicans of two decades ago. Republicans have moved so far to the right that they are off the standard political spectrum and have become a “radical insurgency,” according to conservative political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein.
Chomsky writes that “the Republican Party’s dedication to wealth and privilege has become so extreme that its actual policies could not attract voters, so it has had to seek a new popular base, mobilized on other grounds: evangelical Christians who await the Second Coming, nativists who fear that ‘they’ are taking our country away from us, unreconstructed racists, people with real grievances who gravely mistake their causes, and others like them who are easy prey to demagogues and can readily become a radical insurgency.” (And I thought I wrote long sentences!)
The way things stand right now, no effective climate-change legislation is ever going to come out of Congress – not now, and not after the next national election, regardless of the outcome. When government leaders from around the world met in Paris in late 2015 to discuss “unchecked climate change,” they concluded with an agreement they hoped would be legally binding on the countries that signed it. This is a pipe dream because, as the New York Times wrote at the time, “[a] treaty would be dead on arrival on Capitol Hill without the required two-thirds majority vote in the Republican-controlled Senate.” Any voluntary climate-change mitigation efforts are “a guarantee of failure,” according to the New York Times.
As Chomsky puts it, the Republican Party has become “a real danger to decent human survival.” This despite the fact that two-thirds of Americans are in favor of a binding international agreement to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, according to the New York Times, and more than 60 percent of the people in the U.S. consider climate change a more important issue than the economy. It just doesn’t matter to Congress. As I’ve written before, public opinion has no impact on policy.
Once more on the nuclear brink
Since the advent of the nuclear age, we have come a whisker or two away from the big bombs dropping on dozens of occasions. By luck or the clear thinking of the people whose fingers are on the buttons, we’ve avoided a nuclear-bomb calamity. But things are getting tense between the U.S., Russia, and China, not to mention those three countries’ many surrogates. When the Doomsday Clock was recently moved just a tick away from midnight, the scientists who made the call stated that a primary reason was that “war [between the U.S. and Russia in Eastern Europe] is no longer unthinkable.”
Chomsky’s prescription: A change of course. It’s not too late to enact the environmental and economic protections required to prevent 1) the complete overthrow of our American democracy by fascist corporations, and 2) the end of the human race on planet Earth. No such change is likely from any Democrat or Republican – at least not anytime soon. And time is in short supply.
So I ask again, who do you believe?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There’s too much worth telling you about than I can fit into a single Weekly, but I just got to point out a few other things:
First off, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has designated today, June 21, 2016, as a day of action to stop the proposed changes to Rule 41, which expands the government’s powers to break into people’s computers without a warrant. As EFF Activist Director Rainey Reitman states in a press release, “[t]he government is attempting to use a process designed for procedural changes to expand its investigatory powers.”
The new rule would allow federal magistrate judges to issue warrants to search computers outside their judicial district, which means any computer, anywhere in the world, can be hacked by the government without the owner’s knowledge or consent. This applies even to “innocent Internet users who are themselves victims of a botnet,” according to the EFF. So much for the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that the warrant state “with particularity” what is being searched by the government, why, and when.
In another Fourth-Amendment travesty, the U.S. Supreme Court has expanded the power of police to search and seize items or people in a vehicle even if the initial stop is illegal, if the police run a warrant check after the stop is made that turns up an outstanding warrant. In effect, police can stop any vehicle, any time, with or without reasonable suspicion, if one of the occupants of the vehicle turns out to have an outstanding warrant – even if that warrant is for a mere traffic violation.
Salon’s Daniel Denvir writes in a June 21, 2016, article that the silver lining of the court’s decision is Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s pointed dissent, which explains that the change will unfairly impact poor people, who are more likely to be named in one of the 7.8 million outstanding warrants that currently exist – most of which are for “minor offenses.” The result of the decision is police powers unprecedented in our nation’s history.
Your digital footprint has become a money-maker for Trooly, a new service that offers businesses a rating of your creditworthiness based on your online activities – everything from public crime databases to social-media posts. According to TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas in a June 20, 2016, article, the company applies “machine learning algorithms” to all the public data there is to glean about you on the Internet, including the so-called “dark web.”
The result is a mini-dossier that lets businesses know how trustworthy you are quickly, and without the need or expense of a full-blown background check. Trooly’s primary target is the financial services industry, but the service is so fast and cheap that it’s not difficult to envision businesses of all types asking Trooly for your reliability score before they do business with you. “Sorry, but your Facebook posts disqualify you from receiving our lowest interest rate.”
Phones at concerts and similar events have become a big problem, which has caused some artists to designate their shows as “phone-free.” Alicia Keyes, Louis C.K., and David Chapelle are among the performers who have gone so far as to collect the phones of their concert-goers before the show and place the phones in a locked pouch that attendees keep with them. If you need to use your phone, you exit the concert and a security person unlocks the pouch for you. The Washington Posts’ Geoff Edgers writes about the practice in a June 19, 2016, article on Medium.
The pouch is made by a company named Yondr. Artists feel more free to perform new songs without worrying about bootleg recordings when the audience members’ phones are locked away, and comedians can stop worrying about increased legal liability when their off-the-cuff jokes are published. The concert attendees report that the experience is heightened when no phones are present at the shows.
If Yondr can make concert audiences more respectful of the artists and other audience members, imagine what it could do in a house full of teenagers. I have a feeling Yondr is an idea that will catch on far and wide.
Things happen so fast in the tech world that it’s nearly impossible to keep up – unless you're 13 years old. The Internet can be a wonderful place for children, but as any parent knows (or should), it can be a dangerous place, too. A report released recently by UNICEF provides some insight into what young people are up to online.
Entitled Perils and Possibilities: Growing Up Online (pdf), the report found that 54 percent of the 10,000 18-year-olds surveyed in 25 countries would tell a friend if they were threatened online, and 44 percent believed they could help a friend who encountered an online risk. More worrisome from a parent’s perspective is that 59 percent of the adolescents surveyed believe meeting new people on the Internet is somewhat or very important to them, and more than half claim that a friend has engaged in “risky” online behavior.
The National Children’s Advocacy Center offers Internet Safety Tips for Kids and Teens, and the U.S. government’s official kids site, Kids.gov, provides guidelines for children in grades K through 5, for teens in grades 6 through 8, for parents, and for teachers.
